nimal, knowing nothing of man, and of life nothing but instinct and
motion. In her mother's mature and conscious beauty there is visible the
voluptuous will of a harlot and a queen; but, for herself, she has
neither malice nor pity; her beauty is a maiden force of nature, capable
of bloodshed without bloodguiltiness; the King hangs upon the music of
her movement, the rhythm of leaping life in her fair fleet limbs, as one
who listens to a tune, subdued by the rapture of sound, absorbed in
purity of passion. I know not where the subject has been touched with
such fine and keen imagination as here. The time came when another than
Salome was to dance before the eyes of the painter; and she required of
him the head of no man, but his own soul; and he paid the forfeit into
her hands. With the coming of that time upon him came the change upon
his heart and hand; "the work of an imperious whorish woman." Those
words, set by the prophet as a brand upon the fallen forehead of the
chosen bride, come back to mind as one studies in her husband's pictures
the full calm lineaments, the large and serene beauty of Lucrezia del
Fede; a predominant and placid beauty, placid and implacable, not to be
pleaded with or fought against. Voluptuous always and slothful, subtle
at times no doubt and sweet beyond measure, full of heavy beauty and
warm, slow grace, her features bear no sign of possible love or
conscience. Seen side by side with his clear sad face, hers tells more
of the story than any written record, even though two poets of our age
have taken it up. In the feverish and feeble melodrama of Alfred de
Musset there is no touch of tragedy, hardly a shadow of passionate and
piteous truth; in Mr. Browning's noblest poem--his noblest it seems to
me--the whole tragedy is distilled into the right words, the whole man
raised up and reclothed with flesh. One point only is but lightly
touched upon--missed it could not be by an eye so sharp and skilful--the
effect upon his art of the poisonous solvent of love. How his life was
corroded by it and his soul burnt into dead ashes, we are shown in full;
but we are not shown in full what as a painter he was before, what as a
painter he might have been without it. This is what I think the works of
his youth and age, seen near together as at Florence, make manifest to
any loving and studious eye. In those later works, the inevitable and
fatal figure of the woman recurs with little diversity or change. She